Mark Zuckerberg admitted the move will mean more ‘bad stuff’ on his social media platforms, which are used by billions of people.
Meta is to scrap its longstanding fact-checking programme in favour of a community notes system similar to that on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Instead of using news organisations or other third-party groups as it does currently, Meta will rely on users to add notes to posts that might be false or misleading.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, the company’s two largest social media platforms which have billions of users.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a video.
“More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.
“It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
